With the advent of the Internet age, many industries have adopted online sales as one of their platforms for advertising wares and enabling purchases by customers. The Internet is an efficient platform by which to communicate product availability to a large customer base. Additionally, the ability to allow a buyer to purchase products via the Internet is a time-saving and cost-saving benefit to sellers and buyers alike.
The wood products industry has a need for technology that allows suppliers to easily display their offerings and buyers to easily select and purchase them online. Challenges to representing wood products online include:
Wood market conditions often change rapidly, and sellers must adjust quickly by presenting different customers with different price and availability information;
Sellers may present a wide variety of options to customers for filling their product needs, and sellers may want to choose a specific product;
Each product's technical specifications (for example species, grade, dimension, surfacing, moisture content) are often very important to buyers in manufacturing, construction, and other applications, yet specs may vary across manufacturer;
Seller's offers may not match a buyer's preferred representation of product quantity, and vice versa, so various conversions are often required. For example, while a wood buyer may plan purchases based on a price per railcar, per truckload, per bundled unit, or per piece, the seller may be offering product priced per board-foot, square foot, or cubic meters.